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reviews

Refuge on Crescent Hill

Melanie Dobson
Kregel Publications (2010)
ISBN 9780825425905
Reviewed by Enid Grabner for RebeccasReads (09/10)


The financial crash has impacted everyone and photographer Camden Bristow is left without a paycheck and no visible means of support.  With little left on her credit card she decides to visit her grandmother at her estate, Crescent Hill in Ohio, where as a young girl she spent lovely summers there as respite from an uncaring mother and stepfather.  Upon arrival she finds out her grandmother has died and has surprisingly has left her deteriorating home and property.  Determined to restore it, she encounters mysteries attached to its history.  In addition to strange noises, missing items, secret passageways and hints of hidden treasure, Camden is faced with a town full of people whose loyalties are questionable.

A second storyline soon to collide with the first is the appearance of Stephanie Ellison-Carter, an American history student researching an old family mystery revolving around slave trade and the Underground Railroad.  Needless to say, her travels take her Crescent Hill.

This is an interesting mystery, but in the tight time frame of events, it seems quite unrealistic that so many people with so many individual agendas come together for such a “feel good” resolution.  I also was unaware that this was Christian fiction and I was put off by religious references and morality which I felt were absolutely unnecessary in the development of the plot and characters.  The book was in no way enhanced by this intrusion and it I found it quite off-putting.  Perhaps more concentration on the story itself would have improved the novel.